Six years after his suicide, Mark Fisher (United Kingdom, 1968-2017) is already an indisputable benchmark in Cultural Studies. His legacy, however, has long since spilled over the walls of the academy. That was one of his goals, in fact, when he went from writing –anonymously– for the K-punk blog to publishing, in 2009, his best-known essay, Capitalist Realism. Thus, he decides to “get out of the underground” to become a “popular modernist”. Someone who seemed called to carry out cryptic exercises in cultural exegesis, especially from the analysis of cybernetics (his doctoral thesis, Flatline Constructs, is a cult work), becomes one of the most lucid minds to interpret the traps of capitalism of the 21st century.
His writing, clear and direct, has been reaching readers in Spanish thanks, in large part, to the publishing house Caja Negra, which has recovered its most outstanding titles. In fact, a great way to delve into the thought of the British author is thanks to the interviews that are collected in volume 3 of K-Punk. There he explains that, being a philosophy teacher in a school oriented to the world of work, he becomes aware of how Margaret Thatcher’s phrase “There is no alternative” has infiltrated young people who have not known anything other than global capitalism. “This is how things are, and nothing can be done about it” is what many feel, kidnapped by resignation. The impossibility of thinking about a different future is what he calls “capitalist realism”, and he dedicates a chapter of his essay to “the privatization of stress”. Fisher believes that post-Fordist capitalism – the one that prefers to speculate on digital platforms rather than in factories – has not only led us to permanent anguish, but has also made us believe that we are guilty of our anxiety. The British warn us of the danger of treating mental health as something individual, simply as a chemical error or the consequence of a certain family constellation. Anxiety is, then, a deeply political issue.
Seasoned in music criticism, but with a great philosophical base, Fisher redefines a term from Jacques Derrida, hauntology, to designate the “spectres” that one day were thought of in the past. And he is committed to looking for possible futures, precisely, in those undeveloped potentialities. In Los fantasmas de mi vida he describes that different ontology, based on the trace, not to foster a reactionary nostalgia, but rather to get out of the labyrinth of the present. What must besiege us is not the no more of social democracy as it existed, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism prepared us to expect but never materialized.
It is there where we will find the keys for the resumption of the processes of democratization and pluralism that we yearn for.
Gedisa has just published an essay (The specters of late capitalism) written by Germán Cano, which is also an excellent way to immerse yourself in the universe of Mark Fisher. Cano is right when he describes the British as someone who, modulating the pessimism of critical diagnosis, understands the importance of intervention in the public arena. It is an essential strategy in a still open battlefield.
The son of a cleaning mother, and always tempted by the “melancholy of the declassed”, Fisher understood that he could not rejoice in the role of the “cursed counterculture”. But not for that reason he gave up his ambition and originality. An excellent example is The weird and the creepy, which he published shortly before he died (the Spanish edition, by Alpha Decay, has now gone through seven editions), and where he wondered about the nature of the strange. The strange –which is not exactly terrifying– allows us to feel, at the same time, a mixture of pleasure and pain. A sensation that takes us out of apathy, and that invites us to discover that in each shadow, in each footprint, there is a future to embody.
